Changing practices in British governance of civil science in general, and of geology in particular, in the 1960s led to the formation of a new body, the Institute of Geological Sciences (IGS), which, as well as maintaining the other duties associated with what was previously the Geological Survey of Great Britain, was swiftly given responsibility for surveying and mapping the geology of the North Sea bed. This had become a matter of urgent necessity following the discovery of gas and oil under the North Sea in the late 1950s.

The British Government had begun issuing commercial licences for the exploration and exploitation of this gas and oil in the mid-1960s. By 1967, however, officials in the Ministry of Power (which controlled the licensing process) were becoming aware that they needed much greater expertise in the geology of the North Sea than they currently had. Furthermore, since the first licences would expire in 1970, this knowledge needed to be gathered very quickly. The Ministry was already under external pressure to increase its technical arm, but officials considered that it would be too difficult to generate sufficient expertise internally, and therefore turned to the newly created IGS.

As the pressures of this situation continued to increase and the production of scientific results as quickly as possible became more and more important, the Director of the IGS, Kingsley Dunham, began to feel that the survey work his staff were doing for commercial and government agencies was compromising their more basic survey functions, and that while the income from contractual work was welcome, the continual cuts to the Institute’s state-funded budget would in the end make both the basic surveying and the contractual work more difficult.

This paper therefore considers, through a study of the early years of the IGS and its surveys of the North Sea, how matters of governance reshaped state geology in the Cold War, affecting the relationships between ministries and scientific experts and at the same time reconfiguring geological surveying, scientific funding and debates over ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ science.